Thursday, 27 November 2008

Watara Supervision No-Intro 20081124

"The Watara Supervision is a monochrome handheld game console, originating from Taiwan, and introduced in 1992 as a cut-price competitor for Nintendo's Game Boy. It came packaged with a game called Crystball, which is similar to Breakout. One unique feature of the Supervision was that it could be linked up to a television via a link cable. Games played in this way would display in four colors, much like Nintendo's Super Game Boy add-on for the SNES. A full color TV link was also in the works, but it in light of the Supervision's failure to make a major impression among gamers it was cancelled, along with the games which were in development for it.

Though the machine garnered some attention at launch (mainly due to the low price point for the machine and its games, which many felt might enable it to make inroads into Nintendo's market share) it was ultimately unsuccessful in unseating the Game Boy from its position as the world's most popular handheld. Reasons commonly cited are the poor quality screen which was prone to blurring and made following the action difficult, a general lack of games and the simplistic nature of those that were released.

Yet another problem was that most if not all of the games that were available were developed in Taiwan, meaning that fans of big-name western and Japanese developers were underwhelmed by the apparent lack of support from these companies. Only a tiny handful of games were developed by third parties; those that were are generally reckoned to be superior to those developed in-house. One such third party title - Super Pang - is commonly held to be the best game released on the Supervision and a very good game in its own right. However, up against Nintendo's list of popular franchises (Zelda, Mario, Metroid) and those of its third parties (Castlevania, Mega Man) - all of which eventually surfaced on the Game Boy - the Supervision's games were of little interest to anyone outside Taiwan.

The Supervision was marketed by several different companies around the world and under several different names, including Quickshot (a UK joystick manufacturer), Travell Mate, Hartung SV-100, and Electrolab in Argentina, under two different models: the Supervision (in a form factor resembling Nintendo's Gameboy) and the Hipervision seen in the picture of this article.

In the early 1990s it was once offered as a final prize on the television game show Legends of the Hidden Temple. It was also offered as a prize on the premiere of the 1994 syndicated run of The New Price is Right." (Wikipedia)